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If you’ve ever missed one of your child’s soccer games, graduations, birthday parties or weddings because it was on the same day as a special feeder sale.

You consider anyone who knows what six-weights were bringing at the sale last week an intellectual, and think a person is an uppity social climber if they drop the names of an auctioneer, ring men or brand inspector into their casual conversation. You know for a fact that anyone who uses the “buy now” option on eBay without going through the auction process is a communist.

If your favorite restaurant is the auction market cafe and you don’t even have to order and the waitress brings you your usual.

At least one item of clothing you are currently wearing has the name of an auction business on it. Every pad of paper, calendar or pen in your house you picked up for free at the sale barn. The only thing you read in the paper is the market report.

If you miss just one weekly sale the owner of the local auction market checks the obituaries to see if you died. You get a Christmas card from the sale barn and the highlight of your life so far was being listed in the Representative Sale column.

You’ve ever taken a blind date to a horse sale. You stand when you hear the auctioneer’s song, had it played during at least one of your weddings and have asked your kids to make sure they play it at your funeral.

Even though you haven’t owned any cattle in 20 years there’s at least one buyer’s card in your pocket, probably listing the stuff your wife wanted you to bring back from the grocery store after the sale. Once at the store, upon inspecting a bag of oranges or potatoes you ask the manager if you can “take one out.”

You subscribed to DISH TV just so you can watch cattle auctions. While driving in your truck instead of listening to music or talk radio you listen to tapes of World Champion Auctioneers you got from the LMA. You’ve actually named a child Ralph, Skinner, Stout or Bowie.

Your wife knows better than to make any doctor or dentist appointments for you on sale day. Instead of going to the eye doctor you check you own vision by trying to read the back tags on slaughter cows. The first inkling you had that you were slowly going blind was when you bought a set of Corriente roping steers instead of replacement heifers. And you consigned the steers!

People have actually called the paramedics or the coroner because you can sit for hours without blinking, winking, twitching, moving any extremity or showing any visible sign of life. Your alarm is set to wake you up to the market report and you can’t take a nap unless you sit upright in a chair and hear the auctioneer’s voice.

You go to an antique sale and are not buying or selling anything, or you sit through a six hour art auction and you don’t even like art all that much. The only exotic locales you’ve ever taken your wife to for a vacation were Brush, Cottonwood, Calif. and Billings, Mont. And it just so happened that video sales were taking place there during your vacation. What a coincidence!

As a young single buck or a recent widower you view the monthly small animal sale as a target rich environment for finding a nurse or a purse. When you proposed to your last wife the final words of your proposal were, “Going once, twice....”

You go to every bull sale within a 300 mile radius of your home and you are a stocker operator. You’ve taken a “donut” to sit on at a sale, everyone knows not to sit in your dog’s seat and you listed your lifetime collection of bull sale catalogs as an asset on your last loan application. And when you die you want them sold... at auction.